is this scrum

[jayrayblogs]

Sprint 8

And so the end is here!

Three and a half months of hard work, and the final product has finally been launched. As of writing this, our debut presentation took place almost 24 hours ago at the Crow Museum's UTD Location. Over the course of an hour, we presented the final product, and talked about our struggles and Behind the Scenes work. We answered questions, and I found that on some of them I was figuring them out while I spoke. We still have a final presentation to make and record for the museum's digital archive, but other than that the semester is wrapping up.

Though I was disappointed that this class wasn't what it was advertised to be, I am proud of what we did. It was refreshing to work in a pipeline again, and I hope to use the skills I learned here in my thesis this upcoming final year of my master's program.

Here's the final short, Meet Peanut.

Thanks for joining me on this journey, and thanks to my fellow classmates and project members.

[jayrayblogs]

Sprint 7

Though we're nearing the end of our journey, and my initial job was storyboarding, I've still managed to find work here and there to pick up along the way. This sprint my primary contribution has been leaf animations, which I was initially pretty proud of. After critique, I am no longer so proud of them, but that just means I get to work on improving my skills as an animator. This upcoming week I'm going to resolve to make the leaves more 'spontaneous and natural' instead of looking like they're being piloted. I did my undergrad doing 3d animation in maya, so animating in unreal is still slightly foreign to me. But, I do think all things considered things are coming along quite well.

It appears I've also taken on the role of "resident note-taker" in the group, which honestly I enjoy quite a lot. It gives me something to do instead of just nodding my head along in the meetings with our client.

As always, here's our current progress:

[jayrayblogs]

Sprint 6

Welcome back! A lot has happened during this sprint - we've finally moved past storyboarding and migrated entirely to 3D! At the beginning of this sprint I was particularly worried about finding stuff to do, but the problem ended up fixing itself. Since I was the storyboard artist, I had the best idea of how the camera shots should look, so I was assigned to animate the layout cameras for each of our shots.

I've only really worked with Unreal Engine for the last six months, but due to my history with maya (and previous semesters working in UTD's anim lab) I was able to confront everything pretty well. The hardest part was getting set up with our homebrewed pipeline, which we reached outside of our team for advice on. Through the help of a particularly bright undergrad student, we were able to set up Diversion with Unreal Engine, which allowed multiple people to access and edit on our project simultaneously. It's not foolproof -- if we're not careful we can 'commit', or 'version up' our project over someone else's work, therefore overriding their stuff. Thankfully we haven't experienced major issues. My biggest technical problem was a personal blunder on shots 0060 and 0070. I accidentally started animating the camera for shot 0070 in the same sequence as 0060, and ended up breaking both of them. Not a big issue to fix, and I didn't really like the original camera animations for those shots, so it actually worked out better for me in the long run. My professor even said he had no notes on the layout cameras, which I feel very vindicated about! I made....so many iterations of those cameras....

In other news, we had our third meeting with the client, and they provided feedback that will help us greatly in these last three weeks of the project. It's coming together pretty well, we're at the phase where the biggest issues are animation and lighting, with some minor tweaks of the level designs.

Here's our current progress!

[jayrayblogs]

Sprint 5

Long time no see!

It feels like a lot has happened over the last few weeks. And I suppose a lot has!

The Scrum Lords have been chugging along with the project. While Uma, Jordan and I were going over revision after revision in the storyboards and animatics, Richard, Blaise, Mahsa, and Micheal were working on the 3d environment in Unreal Engine.

Over spring break (in the airport and on the plane as a matter of fact) I worked on getting our latest storyboard panels up to date, using the 3d environment as reference to get as close as possible to the final product as possible. I got some pretty incredible views while drawing in the air.

After getting home, I provided additional assets and frames for Uma to edit together into the animatic, as well as provided feedback on timing and shot transitions, resulting in this as our final product:

I still have some feedback I need to complete in the last iteration, but it should be an easy fix.

Today, we had our second meet up with the client, and it went so much better than our initial pitch. We got much more constructive feedback, and thoroughly impressed them with our progress. Now, we get to set up our pipeline so that our 3d artists can work simultaneously in the same project. I'm a bit nervous about finding work after prepro is done, but I'm sure that there will always be little tasks that I can work on.

[jayrayblogs]

Sprint Number Three!

We've finally gotten started! Over the last two weeks we got to meet our client, meet our muse, pitch our short, and make revisions.

We split the team up to do major tasks, each of us taking a specific assignment to streamline the process.

Meet our Muse, Peanut!

After getting acquainted with our client and Peanut, we started doing research about the time period she was made, and the vibes we wanted to go for. While my teammates worked on digitizing Peanut,

I was given the task of creating the first draft of our storyboard!

This ultimately got torn apart during our first pitch, which was about as expected. So as I went back to the drawing board, I thought about what we were looking for in this short. Pretty much from the beginning my team agreed that adding motives around Peanut's paintings is what we wanted to focus on, so I went researching to try and figure out which flower it was, and what the significance was.

We learned that they were most likely Spider Chrysanthemums, which have an entire festival dedicated to them in Japan, called the "Festival of Happiness", which is celebrated every September 9th.

With that in mind, taking into account what the client wanted changed about the landscape, I went back to the drawing board and came up with our current storyboard, which I get to tweak according to this week's notes:

Stay tuned for the next sprint, where we'll be making a finalized animatic, and starting our digital journey...

[jayrayblogs]

This Week: Photogammetry

This week we've finally started putting our project in motion. We've been introduced to one of our main processes for our upcoming project: Photogammetry! This involves taking a bunch of pictures of an object from all different angles (usually averaging about 300 images) and uploading all of the pictures to a 3d software that then pieces them together like a puzzle. The final result (at least from my first-time experience) is a janky little 3d model that can be exported and used in various projects.

Our class got together earlier this week to take photos of our objects and help each other in the process.

Then we headed to the labs and worked on learning the software, provided by unreal engine. I learned that I needed to take more photos for sure, but I also messed around with a few tools outside of the tutorial video, like the "close holes" tool and the "smooth" tool.

Additionally, we finally got to meet our future muses: we're working with the Crow Museum at the University of Texas at Dallas to digitize one of their artifacts. We were given a list to go through, and there were some clear favorites from the bunch.

As of writing this, we're meeting up with the museum tomorrow to view the artifacts in person and make our final decisions! (I personally am hoping for the little white ceramic dog) I've rented out my camera, and I'm ready to go!

[jayrayblogs]

Scrum Lords Blog: Week 1

This week in Animation Studio II we continued working on learning Scrum, for which I still don't know the purpose of the name, because apparently it's not an acronym. As such, I have decided to try and come up with my own:

Simply

Compiling

Reasonable

User

Management

I know very little about project management. A lot of it seems to be common sense, and staying updated. The closest I've been to a project manager was Lead Animator in my Undergrad's short film, though that was less managing the people as it was managing the software issues.

We've been watching a lot of videos in order to learn how to use Scrum for our project management. I'm a hands-on learner, so I've figured more out through actually working WITH the Scrum Board than I did the videos. This is mainly because the videos we had to watch were full of AI clip art slop, which distracted me the entire time:

ah yes, my favorite days of the week, 2Unday, Wuesday, Tednesday, 2Jursday, Triday, 5aturday, ロunday. This certainly didn't impact my opinion of the presenter at all (<- sarcasm)

All of this being said, the team has settled on the name Scrum Lords. Which sounds a lot like Slum Lords, which is my tactic in Monopoly when I can utilize it: buy up all the cheap property and jack the prices up. Great game, perfect commentary on the atrocities of capitalism. I don't know why I feel the need to bring this up. I'm not used to writing a blog in a professional manner.

This upcoming week, we're supposed to work with cameras, and then hopefully our client. I went out and bought an SD card specifically for this, and will be dropping by the lab tomorrow morning to rent a camera, because it appears I have somehow lost the battery charger for my DSLR here at the apartment.

All of the project management aside, I am excited to work with the museum and its artifacts. I've known my group partners for years, and I'm confident in all of our abilities.

Anyways, until next week.